"Thou art young, and mayest possibly excel early, as a mechanical performer. I need not urge thee to prune the exuberance of thy fancy and to bind thy taste--by nature delicate--to the pure, strong models whose names are, at present, to thee their only revelation. For the scapegrace who figures in thy daily calendar as so magnificently thy superior, will ever stand thee instead of a warning or ominous repulsion, so long as thy style is forming; and when formed, that style itself shall fence thee alike with natural and artful antipathy against the school he serves, that confesses to no restriction, no, not the restraint of rule, and is the servant of its own caprice. "Thou shalt find that many who profess the art, confess not to that which they yet endure,--a sort of shame in their profession, as if they should ennoble _it_, and not it _them_. Such professors thou shalt ever discover are slaves, not sons; their excellence as performers owing to the accidental culture of their imitative instinct; and they are the _ripieni_ of the universal orchestra, whose chief doth appear but once in every age. "Thou shalt be set on to study by thine instructors, and, as I before hinted, wilt ever repose upon their direction. But in applying to the works they select for thine edification, whether theoretic or practical, endeavor to disabuse thyself of all thy previous impressions and prepossessions of any author whatsoever, and to absorb thyself in the contemplation of that alone thou busiest thyself upon. "Thus alone shall thine intelligence explore all styles, and so separate each from each as finally to draw the exact conclusion from thine own temperament and taste of that to which thou dost essentially incline. "In treating of music specifically, remember not to confound its elements. As in ancient mythology many religious seeds were sown, and golden symbols scattered, so may we apply its enforcing fables where the new wisdom denies us utterance, and the nearer towards the expression of the actual than if we observed the literal forms of speech. Thus ever remembering that as the 'aorasia' was a word signifying the invisibility of the gods, and the 'avatar' their incarnation, so is _time_ the aorasia of music the god-like, and _tone_ its avatar. "Then, in _time_, shalt thou realize that in which the existence of music as infallibly consists as in its manifestation, _tone_, and thine understanding shall become invested with the true nature of _rhythm_, which alike doth exist between time and tone, seeming to connect in spiritual dependence the one with the other inseparably.